Does Natural Law Matter?

What are the principles of natural law - and are they relevant to positive law? For thousands of years, natural law principles were at foundational, but they have been abandoned in our current legal discourse. Professor Richard Epstein of NYU School of Law says that this is a mistake. He gives a few key natural law principles and argues that understanding and applying them is essential to improving human welfare.

Professor Epstein, in this series on the Common Law, provides an alternative to the conventional view that property rights are arbitrarily created by the state, and therefore can be changed at will by the state. A few simple rules, he argues, are universal principles of social organization, consistent across time and culture, which form the basis of social gains.

Professor Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speaker.